posted at 2:41 pm on June 19, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Stunning, right? I mean, no one ever thought that a computer system that hadn’t been tested for a massively unpopular imposition of a command economy in health insurance would be tainted by political ambition. No, no, no no no.

Yes:

Under pressure from the White House, Healthcare.gov was launched despite a wave of previously unknown warnings from consultants that the Obamacare website was insecure, untested, and prone to crashing after just 500 people got on, according to a damaging new Senate report.

“The White House continually meddled in technical decisions and put pressure on [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] officials to launch the website on time, regardless of operability and security concerns. As a result, officials ignored countless red flags to launch a website with thousands of defects. In the end, the launch failed miserably, crashing on takeoff,” said the report from Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, ranking member of the panel, with panel member Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and their staff have spent months interviewing key officials, reviewing emails and collecting reports in their probe of the website and concluded that top officials, feeling the heat to burnish President Obama’s health care legacy, ignored several warnings and flipped the switch October 1.

Paul Bedard has the whole PDF available for perusal at the Washington Examiner, but the only surprise here is the scale of the interference. We’ve largely assumed that the insane, Rube Goldberg-esque complexity of the ObamaCare system added to the usual incompetencies of bureaucracy ended up producing a sales portal than can’t even confirm payment on the sales. Now we find, through this report’s conclusions, that the incompetence was a great deal more active than first thought.

By the way, just how clear was it that the Healthcare.gov website rollout should have been delayed? An outside auditor issued warnings that have not been made public until now that the site had 677 “serious defects” and 21,000 lines of defective code. Instead of heeding the internal calls to delay the rollout, now-booted CMS chief Marilyn Tavenner caved in to White House pressure and launched the site anyway. She did that even though:

– Just 23 percent of the site’s coding had been tested.

– Only 40 percent of security controls were tested and the administration didn’t know if they could protect the personal medical and financial information of Obamacare applicants.

– The White House continually piled on new demands, delaying the project, and meddled with the launch with pestering requests and questions.

Basically, the report accuses the White House of deliberately putting taxpayers at risk of identity theft in order to score a few political points. Again, this isn’t exactly news, but it is confirmation. Perhaps it’s time to get Tavenner back up to the Hill and ask her on the record who pressured her into that decision, and what they knew of these flaws when they did.

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So Republicans once more stand in an empty room in the dead of night complaining at the wall that “the-White-House-is-incompetent-and-corrupt-and-abuses-its-power-for-political-gain-and-isn’t-it-just-awful-and-why-doesn’t-somebody-do-something-about-this?”

Stunning, right? I mean, no one ever thought that a computer system that hadn’t been tested for a massively unpopular imposition of a command economy
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SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Oregon has taken new steps toward a potential lawsuit against the developers of its failed health insurance website by hiring a phalanx of lawyers and issuing demands for evidence and other material that could be used in a civil case against technology giant Oracle Corp.

Legal demands for potential evidence were issued Monday, officials in the governor’s office and the state Department of Justice told The Associated Press. But they declined to say how many of the so-called civil investigative demands were issued or whom they target. They are the first such demands issued in preparation for potential litigation against Oracle, said Kristina Edmunson, a department spokeswoman.

In addition, documents obtained by the AP show the state last month more than quadrupled its contract with a law firm handling the case, raising it from $550,000 to more than $2.5 million.
(More…)
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When it came time to certify the website as secure, political pressure again trumped technological reality. Normally, the job of approving a major IT project as secure would go to the Chief Information Officer of CMS, in this case Tony Trenkle. As discussed previously, his subordinate, Chief Information Security Officer Teresa Fryer testified that she recommended to at least four key individuals that the ATO be denied: Tony Trenkle, CMS CIO; George Linares, CMS Chief Technology Officer; Frank Baitman, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Technology and Chief Technology Officer at HHS; and Kevin Charest, Chief Information Security Officer for HHS.112 Ms. Fryer was overruled. Ms. Fryer was overruled. As a result of the controversy, CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner herself signed the ATO, in a highly unusual move. In doing so, she certified the security of the website, and permitted the launch to proceed on October 1.

page 20/21
this is actually a big deal.
and for a private company, from what I understand with limited practice helping certifying my airlines tool control program sites for FAA, criminal.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy elected House majority leader
20s
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is elected House majority leader – @WesleyLowery
see original on twitter.com
===========================

Bids to replace Rep. Eric Cantor in House leadership
5m
The Majority Leader’s vote is being tallied right now; winner will be announced to the press and then whip vote begins – @jeffzeleny
see original on twitter.com

Oregon Governor Kitzhaber gets a twofer on this one: looks like he’s DOING SOMETHING IMPORTANT (hoping to improve his reelection chances), and he gets to shovel a bunch of money to some lib dem lawyer supporters.

There is still NO true security in place on Healthcare.gov AND the backend to connect with the insurers STILL does not exist.

PolAgnostic on June 19, 2014 at 2:46 PM

ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!!

Users of healthcare.gov should realize that ANY AN ALL information they enter is easily compromised, and will probably be widely shared with others in the hacker community. And any payments they make will NOT guarantee that they are actually insured.

So Ed, just a second here. The White House was [pushing for this and that and changes and still meeting the original launch date:

“The White House continually meddled in technical decisions and put pressure on [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] officials to launch the website on time, regardless of operability and security concerns. As a result, officials ignored countless red flags to launch a website with thousands of defects.

The White House continually piled on new demands, delaying the project, and meddled with the launch with pestering requests and questions.

While all the time getting push back from the project leaders and code writers:

officials ignored countless red flags to launch a website with thousands of defects.

And yet, President Obama claims he had no clue that the web site wasn’t anywhere near ready for launch on October 1st until well after October 1st? Hmmm, yeah, right.